There’s a new article about a major change developers need to cause to happen in 2009 – and I’m completely on board. It’s time to let go of IE6. It’s past time.
Unfortunately, some people aren’t ready to let go. We have to give them incentive to upgrade (free!) to a better browser. People aren’t going to stop using something until it stops working – so let’s make it happen. If websites start to look like junk in the IE6 browser – maybe people will consider upgrading.
Yes yes, I know, there are many corporate elements / reasons / excuses that companies continue to use IE. So fine, they can keep using IE6 for their ancient intranet applications if they want. They can still download something like Firefox or Opera for everything else. When, or if, it becomes cumbersome to use 2 different browsers to 2 different activities – then maybe it will be worth it to them to consider revamping their software, but there are few solid arguments to keep support and many to drop it.
I stopped supporting IE6 about 6 months ago, but I’m willing to get on board for the whole ‘lets make some waves’ change. Just to make sure it’s clear – when I say ‘stop supporting’ I simply mean that there should be a rollback for visitors coming to a site using less than IE7 [conditional comments a good solution here] to a plain text version. Accessibility is still an issue and since we all have simple text degradable versions of our sites (right?), this is just going to throw the IE6 users into that bunch with the old Netscape versions and plain text browsers. You might even consider adding a warning to your IE6 users that they should consider upgrading to a modern browser.
If you need help convincing someone (or yourself!), take a look at the nicely compiled reasons to upgrade from IE6.
For me, it’s time to throw in the towel, say our goodbyes – and continue moving forward.
~Nicole
